Keep it simple stupid

Coaching, Mindset, Nutrition, Training

October 7, 2019

Keep it simple stupid. K.I.S.S. for short. This phrase was coined in 1960 by a Lockheed Martin engineer who designed jets for the US Armed Forces. He stated any jet they built should be able to be repaired in the field, under combat conditions, by an air mechanic with simple tools.

This premise carries over into training and diet.

Food

Keep it simple to a handful of ingredients, and a menu you can adapt from those ingredients. Looking to make a diversified fridge full of culinary delights is an amazing thing if you already have a handle on how you eat. Unfortunately for the majority of us, that isn’t the case. Learn the basics of building a menu, sticking to a plan, and simplify it to the point where your only excuses are “I didn’t follow through”, or “I followed through”. Once you start to nail it, you start to diversify your shopping list.

Training

It is popular and common to see boot camp workouts, complex rep and tempo schemes, adapted exercises, and a countless number of modalities that are often fun and give you a seemingly great workout but are they really getting you closer to your specified goal? Simplicity is the mother of progress. Definable progressive variables, relentless execution of your plan, consistency, and when it is married together with quality food intake, the results are undeniable.

Our job as coaches is making the complex simple for you to understand. Training is filled with thousands of different programs and workouts that lure you with promises of fast results, and diets are the same. The craze now is the ketogenic diet but will you be able to sustain and maintain a diet consisting of super low carbs for a long time or is that just another quick fix for you? Will you be able to see long term progress from that boot camp workout or does it just fill a need for endorphin related goals?

Keeping things simple is a goal we should attain for in all aspects of life, and your training and diet is a major part of it.

I fell into this trap not long ago, I freely admit it. For as much as I preach the need for simplification and removing the unneeded, I failed at it. I hyper analyzed my workouts, program hopped on a few occasions, started with goals, got frustrated, and changed them mid-goal. It took me looking at the past two year of my training career and seeing absolutely zero progress and in some ways I regressed. I was thinking “well I am 40+, I avoided a major health scare a few years ago, *insert excuse here*” but the fact remains it was my fault for not having clear, definable goals backed by a program meant to attack those goals.

I coach others to do those very things and here I was not able to coach myself anymore. I have moved on from it because I needed fresh eyes and accountability.

I hired a coach again and decided to focus on what work he has for me and the results started to come again.

Training and diet isn’t rocket science, it’s not nuclear engineering. It is a pursuit of goals meant to enhance and build your life and health, not take away from it and cause you unneeded stress.